Upon doing my regular rounds of Zauba, I came across two very interesting entries. One is related to Nvidia, which I will cover in this article and the other is related to AMD. Which you can find over here. Zauba is one of the only, 100% authentic sources of upcoming devices, being the repository of shipping manifests that it is. Since all chips need to be tested, and since this testing usually happens offshore, every upcoming device manufactured at TSMC will pass through here. The entry in question, is listed as an “Nvidia JM601 Graphics Processor” and shipped from its port on the 14th of October.

For want of a better image, the Maxwell PR material. @Nvidia Public Domain

A mysterious graphics chip from Nvidia spotted in shipping manifests on Zauba: the JM601

Needless to say we have never encountered this nomenclature before. The naming JM601 is completely alien to me. In the past, GPUs popping up in the shipping manifests usually had their actual names. Considering that the previous Nvidia chip spotted also had a weird name (the 433×3, a possible scrambled name for the upcoming Dual GPU), there are two possible things that could be happening: 1) Nvidia has finally wizened up and started scrambling the code names of the GPUs to hide their progress from our eyes or 2) the nomenclature is correct and this is something we have never seen before. I will touch upon both possibilities but it is upto the reader to decide which one they think is actually happening.

Here is what we know for sure: Nvidia is testing a chip with the nomenclature JM601. It is a pretty expensive piece too costing 73, 917 INR, which equals to approximately 1136 USD. Even after accounting for the fact that this is probably a prototype chip – this is a pretty huge figure. To put it into perspective the GM200 prototype chip was only listed at ~30, 000 INR. Barring this, we have very little information about what this could be – only that it is something Nvidia is currently working on.

Now onto what we do not know. If Nvidia has indeed started scrambling the codenames of their products then not only would it get very difficult to identify which product has shipped; but it would also become very difficult to identify the product type itself. There is also no guarantee that we would be able to de-scramble the codename – and even if we do – that it is indeed correct. Basically, it would put a stop to the Zauba/shipping manifest based leaks almost completely. It is worth noting here that chips spotted at Zauba usually become public in a matter of few months (usually 4-5). Since this coincides with the release date of Pascal – it is a possibility that we are looking at a flagship chip of the 16nm FinFET generation.